Ballad in Plain D

A film shot in two disappearing locations in Brussels, the Cité Administrative and the Greenwich Bar, temporarily emptied of inhabitants but full of specters and ghostly presences, suggested most directly by the entranced performance of actor Lucy McKenzie. 'Ballad in Plain D' takes as its source W.G. Sebald’s Campo Santo, ruminating on the status of ghosts and unworldly beings, anxious visitors and exiles dwelling in extraterritoriality, in marginal and temporary spaces. In Sebald’s writing, these “fleeting transparent beings of uncertain provenance and purpose” metaphorically echo the fixed, quasi-transcendental gaze of actors within the motionless frame of early film, as well as popular beliefs about the presence and influence of the dead in the realm of the living. Suggesting that Kafka’s writing has the quality of noctambulism, or that Nabokov’s appearance in evening dress in films shot in Berlin in the 1920s might both be understood as manifestations of wandering spirits dwelling in hazy or uncertain territory.
(Source: https://vimeo.com/204783626)